BY DONNA HUSSEY-WHYTE Observer staff reporter husseyd@jamaicaobserver.com Monday, June 09, 2014
WHILE cellular phones have become more or less a second skin for this generation, 100-year-old Nerissa Golding recalls that telegrams were the medium utilised for emergency contacts over 50 years ago.
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| 100-year-old Nerissa Golding |
"We never know nothing about cellular phone," Golding told the Jamaica Observer last Thursday. "We used to communicate by telegram. So if you had an emergency and needed to contact someone you would send a telegram from the post office and they would send it by somebody to take it to you," she explained.
She said 40 years ago she was honoured by the then Governor General Sir Florizel Glasspole for her service to the country as an accountant. The message notifying her of the award was, of course, relayed to her via telegram.
"The time when I was getting the meritorious service award I came home one evening and saw a policeman sitting on a motorbike and as I came to the gate the man came up and gave me a telegram which told me they were giving this meritorious service. And they wrote something on it telling me about the event and I was to mark 'yes' or 'no'. I marked yes and gave it back to the man and he jumped on his bike and gone!" she recalled.
No electricity
"There was no electricity when I was growing up," Golding added. "They had kerosene lamp and lantern. And we used to study with that at nights and when you studying or whatever yu doing yu would have it on the table or you 'kotch' up beside it, and that time you wouldn't be thinking that it was going to affect your eyes or anything like that. But that was what you had to use. It could have been on the way to affecting me but I didn't think about that," the centenarian, who now wears a pair of eyeglasses, said.
Because there were no street lights, Golding said people would refrain from travelling at night while those who did would use a bottle torch. more
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